I just spent three days and nights billeted at Buvljak, the flea market next to Vero in New Belgrade, and I have come away with the following inventory:  One t-shirt, a plastic box with no apparent function, one cd of dubious and unnamable origin, a bread box, four unassorted pillows, a toilet seat, and a hub cap. None of these items, of course are on my list. And none of the items on my list are checked as being obtained.

Oh yes, I mean, IF we are already sick. And IF we get in line early enough. And because only 140,000 doses of the bug are sitting in Serbian vials, by a rough calculation, there is one shot for every 57,142 people.

When shopping for toys (toys!), I experienced a kind of outrage that very rarely befalls me. My curmudgeonly nature causes me to grumble and complain a lot and often, but very rarely does something, some behavior, drive me to the edge of tolerance. 

And now, we have formalized our decision by swearing him in as the forty-fourth president of the US. We got our change we think. But he has not changed much yet - except the words.

The words are important. The words of the past administration had been words about fear, security, and about threats - everywhere there were threats. The words made us feel safe at first. We thought that someone else was worried about our safety.

But then we wanted change from these words. Those words made us act out of worry. They divided us. They sullied the reputation of the country abroad.

Fireworks? No, firearms.

I find myself thinking in quips and quotes and bons mots. I am unable to sustain a thought for more than about three seconds before looking for new sensory inputs. I am deathly afraid that I may lose my train of thought and not even be able to finish this blog post. I might substitute a YouTube video instead. I might just encapsulate the whole thing in a three word sentence.

Facebook is slowly robbing me of my already challenged attention span.

But now, after trying to go virtually every day (and managing three or four times in reality) since the beginning of this month, I find that I am not going to be disproven. My original hypothesis, which I have been propounding for as many years as I remember, seems to withstand the experimentation phase.

I do not like the gym.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Due to the new law on traffic, I am currently in the market for trading in my car in exchange for an elephant. Please contact this blog with photo and details. Camels also will be considered. No time wasters please.

Given that the newly sanctioned traffic cameras will apparently be rolling all the time, there will be no place for the White City's traffic cowboys to hide. By cowboy, I am referring to the guy in the black Audi, with no license numbers, slaloming from right to left to right lanes at 130 kph while talking on one cell phone, texting on another, lighting a cigarette, changing the cd music, and wearing dark glasses behind tinted windows.

In my continuing quest to learn the Serbian language (a quest which is often interrupted and curtailed by intervening events, obligations, and Tuesdays), I have come to realize that I have overlooked an essential part of learning this language that has nothing to do with my six-word vocabulary, my mastery of one tense and one grammatical case, or my inability to deal with multiple declensions.

Attitude.

The cows around town, on Trg Republike, on Knez Mihajlova, generally mind their own business. They accost no one for theatre subscriptions, tissues, or wilted flowers. They do not ask the time or directions to Delta City. They look straight ahead into their forward progression or innocuously feed on the weeds growing from cracks in the paving.